


Give Me One Good Reason

by psylocke



Category: Marvel (Comics), X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: F/F, Unrequited Crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-30
Updated: 2015-06-30
Packaged: 2018-04-06 22:50:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4239663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psylocke/pseuds/psylocke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vera Cantor understands why her best friend has feelings for the childish Bobby Drake, she just wishes it didn't mean she needs to spend time with Professional #Meninist Henry McCoy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Give Me One Good Reason

**Author's Note:**

> So, apparently this is a ship we captain. Welcome aboard.

There was something about the way Zelda Kurtzberg carried herself. She was as pretty as Grace Kelly, sharp as Lucille Ball, and funny as Ethel Merman. It was a disservice to all those women to compare them to one another — her heroes, in every sense of the word — but Vera Cantor had never been good with words. Her vocabulary was rich, but that didn’t always translate to beautiful thoughts. She was a librarian, orderly, quick on comparison: when she thought about Zelda, dear Zelda, she thought of the women who had defined her and the woman she loved.

Loved. It was such a terrible word, love. It was like watching a race while already knowing the outcome. She was hardly a defeatist in most areas of her life (all things together, for a woman her age she was doing quite well for herself), but romance was a dead end in every sense of the word. That was the only reason she allowed herself to be humiliated at the hands of that beast.

Henry McCoy was a pig, there was no mincing words about it.

But he happened to be best friends with Robert Drake, whose baby face was enough to excuse him from the childish stunts he pulled. He was harmless enough, really, when it came down to it, but his choice in friends left something to be desired. Vera couldn’t fault Zelda for finding him so charming — when he smiled, even she felt a little more at ease. The fact that the two were inseparable had been a particular thorn in her side for the past several months, but seeing her friend happy was what mattered most, wasn’t it?

She wasn’t so sure anymore.

It didn’t stop her from believing it anyway.

“—Then Bobby, he told me… Vera, are you listening?” Zelda’s hand reached out across the table, waving her back to reality. The smile on her lips was infatuating, and the little chuckle she gave made a lump grow in Vera’s throat. “Are you okay? You’ve been an astronaut wife all morning.”

“Who, me?” What a silly question. She wasn’t talking to the eggs benedict. Brushing the hair back from her face, Vera glanced up from her plate and shook her head. “I’m sorry, Zel. Hank on the brain.”

Her face fell, a mix of pity and repulsion they both shared. They’d been friends for so long, since preschool, that they shared the same range of emotions. Happy, angry, and Hank McCoy. “I promise, V, we’re going to find you somebody better. It’s just that—you know Bobby. Henry’s like his security blanket. It’s almost—”

“Endearing,” she interjected, finishing the thought for her friend. “If it weren’t for the fact that Mr. McCoy is the least endearing male specimen on the entire planet. I’d rather date Tony Stark.”

“Don’t say that,” Zelda said, hiding behind a glass of orange juice. “You don’t know where he’s been.”

It was getting easier now, much easier than it had been at first, to see Zelda smile whenever Bobby’s name was mentioned. They were hardly an exclusive couple, but they’d gone on enough dates that it was easy to see she saw a future there. Whether or not it was dystopic remained to be seen. “It’s fine,” she said finally. “He’s harmless. Hasn’t laid a finger on me yet except to cross the street. He’s a pig, but he’s a pig who knows not to leave the pen when the gate’s left open. So, anyway — what did Bobby say?”

 

— — —

 

They kept a straight face until the boys left, but Vera felt the rage bubbling up inside of her. That was how she dealt with her emotions: blind rage. Next to her, she could practically feel Zelda shaking, but for totally different reasons. She watched Hank scoot around the corner, Bobby half a step ahead of them. They seemed genuine in their apologies, but it was one in a string of many. “No-good… childish…” she shouted after them, knowing full well they were long gone. “Henry McCoy, if I see your face again, mine’ll be the last thing you ever do!”

Then came the first whimper, and before she could turn to face Zel down, they were half-hugging, whole-comforting. Zelda was warm, and cold, and shaking, and blue, but her arms were the only comfort Vera had ever appreciated, the only hands she didn’t mind feeling on her back. When she pulled back, and the hug ended, it was bittersweet. “V, I’ve—I’ve done it again!” she cried, “I’m an awful friend! I pulled you away from a night in, only to have it ruined…”

Vera sucked air in through her teeth, then reached out for another hug. There was a time, not long after high school, that instigating a hug like this posed a certain challenge for her. When her heart burned every time their skin touched. That crush had since mellowed out, still present and lingering, but it didn’t make her want to catch fire. “Oh, dear—you’ve done nothing. It was those boys. It’s always them. I don’t know what you see in him.” That was a mistake, it always was.

“I love him!” They were the words of a girl who truly believed what she was saying. “I know he’s no good, but I love him, Vera. I can’t help it.”

“He’s no good,” she said, refusing to break the hug until Zelda had calmed down. “I know it. You know it. Half the blamed city knows it. And… I know why you feel for him, I do, but I hate to see you like this, Zel. What do you say, we stop by the store and buy ourselves a bottle of wine and catch this week’s episode of Twilight Zone at my place?”

“Well,” Zelda said, tears still stinging her eyes but slowly composing herself. “It’s bound to be better than crying in the Village.”

 

— — —

 

Their rosy cheeks and noses took some time to vanish, even after retreating to the well-insulated Barrow Street apartment. Both of Vera’s roommates had gone out for the evening, which seemed like one of the predestined things that only happened in the movies, but she pushed those thoughts out of her mind and turned her focus to comforting her heartbroken friend.

She set a container of Jiffy Pop on the stove — as fun to make as it is to eat — and collected the two wine glasses before returning to the small love-seat usually shared by three. Two seemed practically comfortable. “Did you have ulterior motives in inviting me here, Vera?” Zelda asked, almost as soon as she settled onto the sofa. It managed to make her heart race. “You don’t want to watch Twilight Zone at all, do you? You want to talk. About feelings.”

Her chuckle was a sharp one, trying to simultaneously clear her throat. “I’m tricky like that,” she joked. “And I didn’t think our conversation was over. Only it’s not a conversation that one should have on Bleecker Street. At least not in the evening. Tell me: how are you feeling? Really.”

“Really?” she repeated, and took in a deep breath. “Lousy.”

“That’s all?”

“I feel like hitting a man square in the jaw and making him pay for standing me up.”

Vera drew her legs up beneath her, reaching for the bottle of wine between them on the floor. “You’ve caught my interest. Keep saying things like that.”

Laughing, Zelda threw her head back. “Vera, I know you hate men. And I know you especially hate men like Hank, but Bobby… he’s different. He means well, you know that, but…”

“Meaning well isn’t good enough,” she pointed out. “Any man that makes you suffer as much as Bobby Drake has doesn’t deserve a woman like you. You know that.”

“I do.”

“And yet…?”

With a sigh, Zelda took her glass of wine and took a sip. Then another sip. “Yet I can’t help but be infatuated with him. He’s like a virus, can’t get him out of my skin.”

There was a pause, and Vera reached out to press a finger against her friend’s shoulder. “Then what you need is right in front of our noses. Detox, medicine, and a rebound. Ideally somebody with a driver’s licence. And maybe the ability to grow facial hair.”

“Yuck.”

“You’ll come to like it,” Vera assured her. “Maybe you’ll start going after boys and start going after adults.”

Zelda twitched her nose, smirking crookedly and shaking her head. “Mmm… I don’t think so,” she joked. “Once they start earning a real salary, they stop knowing how to have fun.”

“You’re impossible.”

“I know,” she said. “And that’s why you love me.”

Zelda Kurtzberg was something special. Grace Kelly, Lucille Ball, Ethel Merman — they didn’t hold a candle to her. It wasn’t a competition, and nobody was keeping score, but Vera Cantor knew it to be true. She loved those women, had spent much of her adolescence worshipping those women, but they weren’t Zelda. Zelda was true, close, less of an idea constructed in her fantasy and a person she was lucky enough to know. A person she was lucky enough to have care about her, too, even if those feelings didn’t quite match up between them.

There might have been a time where a phrase like that would have worried her, made her feel like she’d been found out. Her little secret had been discovered. Back when she was younger, before she knew the words to describe it, the right terminology to identify herself for who she was. Words that, when she was aching and afraid and longing, she would have been terrified, elated, surprised to hear. She loved Zelda, but she knew there was more to a relationship that love: trust, understanding, friendship. She also knew love was not this behemoth of importance. It didn’t define, it didn’t complete. It was an aspect, part of the whole, big enough to be missed but small enough to live without.

She loved Zelda, but she was happy being there for her.

“I do,” she answered back with a wide smile. The Jiffy-Pop screamed on the stovetop, and she rushed to her feet to pull it off the gas. “I do love you. That’s why I’m telling you — as your best friend — you need to ditch that boy and find somebody who knows how to balance a chequebook.” She vanished from view momentarily, then returned with the popcorn, ballooning over the aluminium, with a sly smirk playing on her lips. “And, maybe, he has a friend who isn’t the very definition of slime-ball? For your girlfriend wingwoman?”


End file.
